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The one-man team behind first-person shooter The Alien Wasteland has rechristened his game Action Alien after running into legal hot water with InXile Entertainment.
Writing in a Steam blog post, Devdan said that InXile had issued a cease and desist to him regarding his use of the word ‘Wasteland’, which it claims it holds the rights to following Kickstarted revival project Wasteland 2 in 2012.
“Since I don’t have the time nor the strength to deal with legal actions from this developer and its lawyers, or even taking the risk of having my game to be took down from Steam, I decided to change the title to solve this issue, even though this has been a great loss in time and efforts for a very questionable complain[t],” Devdan said.
He added that he had attempted to dismiss the claim by explaining “both games have almost nothing in common and no case of confusion was ever reported for almost two years since my game was first announced”.
Elaborating on the InXile forums, associate producer Thomas Beekers claimed that “the C&D only happened because the developer was unwilling to recognize the issue, only offering to change the game’s name if we paid him for it”.
“Asking to be paid for infringing on someone’s rights is certainly a new one for us, so of course we refused,” he stated.
“We do not know if the developer of Action Alien was aware of our Registered trademark when he initially named his game and bear absolutely no ill will towards the creator of Action Alien or the game.
"We always look for amicable win-win solutions in these cases, where we seek to protect our mark as any prudent business would do.”
Another of ‘these cases’ was InXile’s 2013 run-in with developer Vlambeer, the creator of Wasteland Kings, which ultimately resulted in the roguelike being reborn as Nuclear Throne.
